Did Doctor Who do it for you?

By Jim White

12:01AM BST 02 Jul 2007

On Saturday night I finally succumbed. The relentless hype had done its work. I sat down to watch the final episode of the latest series of Doctor Who. It wasn't just the breathless BBC publicity machine telling me this was the greatest Doctor ever that made me engage for the first time with Russell T Davies's freshly minted Time Lord.

I had watched that hilarious clip on YouTube, evocatively entitled Whogasm, in which two portly teenagers had recorded themselves squealing their way through a recent episode, reaching such a point of excitement when the Doctor's old enemy the Master appeared that they seemed to be in urgent need of an ambulance. There was clearly something going on, because even my father-in-law, a man of impeccable judgment on most things, informed me that the Master revelation was the finest bit of television drama he had seen in years. What I was about to watch, he insisted, was no ordinary programme; it was a cultural event.

And indeed the show did transport me to another place. At the critical point, possibly where the Master was attempting to establish a new Gallifrey at the heart of a billion-year inter-galactic empire, or where the Doctor was interrupting the Archangel network's telepathic signal by aligning his black-hole converter, I drifted off to the land of nod, dozing happily on the sofa as a load of old cosmic screwdrivers washed over me.

True, coming to a work at its climax is possibly not the best way to judge it. Unless you have seen the plot lines develop, you don't get much out of watching them unravel. Maybe if I had experienced the tension ratcheting up as the Medusa Cascade threatened to blow, thus smothering the space/time continuum, I too could have enjoyed the cathartic release when the rift was sealed by the Doctor. But I doubt it.

To me, there didn't seem to be anything compelling. The much-vaunted post-modern twists put in by Davies were hardly heart-stopping. A couple of gags about mobile-phone reception and a passing similarity between the Master (as played by John Simm) and Tony Blair did not make it the 21st-century equivalent of the work of James Gillray.

Plus, as has been the case with Doctor Who across the generations, budget restrictions ensured the special effects were never going to match those of Hollywood movies. The main outdoor set piece still involved our heroes scrabbling across a quarry in exactly the way Whos have scrabbled for decades. But then, had Davies been in possession of the annual expenditure of the Ministry of Defence and had his denouement featured a set the size of Torquay and enough pyrotechnics to match the Northern Lights, plus a script written by Tom Stoppard in collaboration with the team behind The Simpsons, I still wouldn't have been much moved. In much the same way, I am not remotely bothered about the goings-on in Star Wars, have no interest in whether Harry Potter gets kissed by a passing Dementor and find the search for a bit of jewellery by a bunch of vertically challenged, hairy-toed New Zealanders as certain a cure for insomnia as any yet discovered by medical science.

For some people such a confession is the cultural equivalent of heresy. But the fact is, you either get fantasy or you don't. It either sets your imagination soaring or leaves you earthbound. There is no such thing as someone who quite likes The Lord of the Rings, or thinks His Dark Materials is all right to pass the time of day. With fantasy, you either take it, fully formed and in its entirety, or leave it, and get on with your life unencumbered by Orcs and cosmic dust.

The gap between those who love this sort of thing and those who find its appeal baffling is as wide as any fissure in our society, as between Cavalier and Roundhead, socialist and conservative, real-ale aficionado and lager lout. Unlike those divides, however, it is almost impossible to tell which side you fall. Gordon Brown, for instance, whose position on other issues might seem easy to predict, turns out to keep a copy of Harry Potter by his bedside. Stephen Fry, fount of all knowledge, went one better and read every single word of the interminable tomes for talking books. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins, the über-rationalist, is so fond of Doctor Who he married one of its former stars.

There is, though, one easy shorthand for working out where someone stands across the fantasy gap: if she is a woman, she can generally manage without it. Which is maybe what was happening as I snoozed through the Doctor: I was being put in touch with my feminine side.